Space upstart plans public cloud in low Earth orbit

Moving VMs in fleet of micro-sats for virtual geosynchronous satellites

And we’re glad we did, because – without going all gadget-mag OMG! about it – this stuff sounds cool.

The company plotting to put VMs in space is called Vector Space Systems. It says it will fly a range of rockets. The baby of the company’s fleet, the “Vector-R,” is a deliberately small vehicle that can lift payloads of up to 60kg to low-Earth orbit. And it’s simple enough that Vector thinks it can be launching 100 times a year.

Today, satellites are mostly bespoke, so to keep up with a hundred-a-year launch cadence, Vector’s also designed a “GalacticSky satellite hardware and payload compute environment”.

As explained to The Register by Shaun Coleman, the GM of the GalacticSky unit of Vector, the design results in satellites “about the size of a loaf of bread” but still packing two discrete computers.

One runs a real-time OS on ARM or PowerPC silicon and gets the job of keeping the satellite humming. The other will be air-gapped [vacuum-gapped? – Ed] from the main board and will offer “x86 Intel-based, multi-core hardware including several terabytes of high-speed solid state storage”.

Coleman explained the plan is to “effectively ‘rent’ satellite resources on a per-minute, per-orbit basis.”

“For example, when a particular satellite is over the US, Customer A has use of the satellite using its VMs, and when it’s over Europe, Customer A’s VM is paused/snapshotted while Customer B’s VM is enabled and starts processing. This can all be done within seconds, or as fast as a revert to snapshot today in Xen, without the need to build, own or launch a satellite.”

Vector hopes to operate a fleet of satellites and allow live VM migration between them to create virtual satellites comprising several physical satellites. Here’s how Coleman explains that scenario:

At this point, space-savvy Reg readers are probably saying, “But small low-Earth orbit satellites don’t last long.” You’re right to worry, but Vector thinks its sats should last between two and five years. Or as Coleman puts it, “Think standard PC/Server refresh rates for an enterprise customer.” And because the Vector-R has a base price of just US$1.5m, Coleman says “the cost of the satellites is low enough that we can take advantage of Moore’s Law and replenish the GalacticSky satellite constellations as the satellites de-orbit.”

Vector has cooked up its own CentOS-based “GalacticOS”, which it says is nicely lightweight and otherwise optimised to use on its satellites. But if you want to use another OS it won’t object as it will use vanilla XenServer. Coleman says Vector will also provide “helper VMs … routing or networking VMs like Netscaler from Citrix optimised for space”.

Vector’s satellites will be optimised for either imaging or communication. Imaging satellites benefit from on-board VMs for scenarios like pre-analysing captured images so users need download only the snaps they think will be useful.

Coleman thinks the comms sats can become a “switching fabric for space by performing the functions we take for granted here on Earth, like space-based network routing, caching, QoS, firewalling, load balancing and others.”

Vector thinks that it has a shot at becoming the equivalent of a public cloud, but for space. Coleman says that investors are currently leery of space startups because of the colossal costs and risks of building one’s own bird. But if developers can send a VM into space and try it on some customers, they’ll get the kind of springboard that public clouds offer terrestrial startups.

That’s some nicely blue-sky thinking, but not the work of space cadets. Vector has conducted successful engine tests and a sub-orbital launch. It plans to fly a Vector-R “as early as this summer,” has a customer for 21 launches, and thinks it can start regular commercial launches in 2018.

So brush up those CVs, XenServer admins. Your career could be about to blast off! ®

admin
7 months ago

Blackberry Ltd may have exited the device business, but fans of the pioneering email machine need not despair as Chinese smartphone maker TCL Communication has introduced its first Blackberry-licensed...
Read More